A Little Night Music
Mar. 12th, 2009 12:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ceebeegeeI've been rediscovering A Little Night Music lately. I've always loved that score, I always felt its Northern European-ness spoke to me, especially "Every Day a Little Death." Interestingly it's based on a comedy--it IS a comedy--but has such a complex, sophisticated, melancholy core. And the stuff the liebeslieder singers do is amazing--of all Sondheim's many amazing lyrics, I don't think you can top "the hands of the clock turn/but don't sing a nocturne just yet." So clever, it just takes your breath away.
I was reading about it on Wikipedia and looked up the film. They set the film in Austria??? The hell? Why? Austria has no midnight sun, that's a Scandinavian phenomenon--and if you remove that element of the setting, you remove the whole metaphor of "Perpetual Anticipation" which is a BRILLIANT metaphor--why would they gut the story that way? Plus, as I said, the core of melancholy is a Northern European thing (a Scandinavian thing, I should say)--culturally, Germans are not supposed to suffer from depression the way the Swedes are.
I was reading about it on Wikipedia and looked up the film. They set the film in Austria??? The hell? Why? Austria has no midnight sun, that's a Scandinavian phenomenon--and if you remove that element of the setting, you remove the whole metaphor of "Perpetual Anticipation" which is a BRILLIANT metaphor--why would they gut the story that way? Plus, as I said, the core of melancholy is a Northern European thing (a Scandinavian thing, I should say)--culturally, Germans are not supposed to suffer from depression the way the Swedes are.
